Blender 2.48 Launches!

The irresistible march of Blender continues. Yesterday the team announced the launch of version 2.48. This is less than two months after version 2.47 was release, which itself was just 3 months after 2.46. That’s a nice release schedule for incremental updates. Some users may not like such regular updates, but personally I like to see progress in in growing Open Source multimedia projects. Adopting an agile development and release philosophy surely keeps users more engaged than a big once per year waterfall approach. When it comes to software, like Operating Systems, others may disagree.

But I digress, back to Blender 2.48. The release notes highlight the following enhancements:

“… all the work done on the Blender Game Engine and the Apricot Open Game “Yo Frankie!”, with much better functioning game logic editing, character animation, and Blender Material based real-time shaders. And as last minute surprise a Bullet physics update with Softbody support.

We also included a lot of new development in this release; Windows 64 bits support, Grease Pencil for sketching annotations, Sun/Sky/Atmosphere rendering, new modifiers, and an improved text editor with Python API support. And last but not least, an enormous list of open bug reports were handled.”